Email system provision is unregulated in the UK.

vofs007

Trinitrotoluene wrote: »

I really think that this is a non issue. For a start, the e-mail market is completely open anyway so if a consumer or a business is not happy they can simply move to a different provider. I'm struggling to see the basic issue.

Ordinary consumers that have had the same email address for more than say a couple of years cannot simply move to another supplier without a good deal of inconvenience.
I am surprised at the number of posters that suggest stop complaining to the supplier and go elsewhere. The implication is that suppliers are untouchable because they are not regulated and can do what they like.

RobTang

vofs007 wrote: »

Ordinary consumers that have had the same email address for more than say a couple of years cannot simply move to another supplier without a good deal of inconvenience.
I am surprised at the number of posters that suggest stop complaining to the supplier and go elsewhere. The implication is that suppliers are untouchable because they are not regulated and can do what they like.

They are more untouchable because its generally a free service and with that its not like a regulator can enforce a level of up time or force compensation where your direct losses are zero.

tronator

vofs007 wrote: »

Ordinary consumers that have had the same email address for more than say a couple of years cannot simply move to another supplier without a good deal of inconvenience.
I am surprised at the number of posters that suggest stop complaining to the supplier and go elsewhere. The implication is that suppliers are untouchable because they are not regulated and can do what they like.

It's the consumer's fault that they chose an email address with their ISP. If you want an email address for life which you can use with any provider, get your own domain and host it with any of many many companies.

Or are you really suggesting that email should be regulated so that you can transfer any email address to another provider? Then you don't understand how email (or to be precise DNS) works.

Still only 24 signatures

Nilrem

tronator wrote: »

It's the consumer's fault that they chose an email address with their ISP. If you want an email address for life which you can use with any provider, get your own domain and host it with any of many many companies.

Or are you really suggesting that email should be regulated so that you can transfer any email address to another provider? Then you don't understand how email (or to be precise DNS) works.

Ah but it's only a technical issue, I'm sure it could be fixed by those well known technical wizards in the HOC by just declaring it should be done!

I can imagine the fun the spammers and scammers would have with it.

securityguy

tronator wrote: »

It's the consumer's fault that they chose an email address with their ISP. If you want an email address for life which you can use with any provider, get your own domain and host it with any of many many companies.

Or are you really suggesting that email should be regulated so that you can transfer any email address to another provider? Then you don't understand how email (or to be precise DNS) works.

Still only 24 signatures

Technical credentials: have managed large email systems since 1986. Have architected large telephone networks, including working on proposals for replacing the core PSTN switches for the UK (and presenting the architecture to BT and Ofcom).

Providing email forwarding is no harder than providing number portability between mobile operators and would not, of itself, present significant technical or operational issues. There are multiple architectures one can imagine, depending on whether such portability became common or was only taken up by a minority of users (number portability for mobile and landline has surprisingly low takeup). At massive scale it might involve putting a layer of shared directors in front of the participating ISP's machines, but that would be a matter for subsets of participants for their own convenience (ie, if there was a huge demand for porting from isp1.co.uk and isp2.co.uk they would advertise a joint MX record which would known which ISP's underlying systems to forward to on a per-use basis); however, in practice it would be done by simply insisting that ISP X maintain email addresses after the customer has left, and forward them to ISP Y.

The guy's a loon and the petition is nonsense, but providing long-term email address portability is not, of itself, crazy. It would require some co-operation between UK email providers (obviously, its writ would not run outside the UK) and it would have some security implications that would require careful thought. There are also some namespace management issues. But none of this is insurmountable. I suspect there's less demand for it than he makes out, as (for example) the fact that you can't port landline numbers between exchange areas without paying significant amounts of money is not generally regarded as a problem. And I also instinctively favour market solutions unless there is clear evidence of market failure. But that doesn't get away from the fact that this is technically possible.

esuhl

vofs007 wrote: »

Ordinary consumers that have had the same email address for more than say a couple of years cannot simply move to another supplier without a good deal of inconvenience.

How daft would a consumer have to be to not realise that the email address they get free through their ISP will only work while they maintain their subscription?!

Who joins BigISP.com, gets the email address randomstring189318@bigisp.com, and expects it to work forever, for free, when they cancel their subscription with bigisp.com?!

There is already a solution to what you claim is the problem! You just get your own domain name! How easy does it have to be for you?!

Why would you want to break the whole email system for everyone just to implement something that no one actually wants or needs?!

securityguy

esuhl wrote: »

How daft would a consumer have to be to not realise that the email address they get free through their ISP will only work while they maintain their subscription?!

How daft would a consumer have to be to not realise that the telephone number they get free through their mobile operator will only work while they maintain their subscription?

Who joins BigISP.com, gets the email address randomstring189318@bigisp.com, and expects it to work forever, for free, when they cancel their subscription with bigisp.com?!

Who joins Vodafone, gets the phone number 07XXX YYYYYY and expects it to work forever, for free, when they cancel their subscription with Vodafone?

There is already a solution to what you claim is the problem! You just get your own domain name! How easy does it have to be for you?!

There is already a solution to what you claim is the problem! You just get your own 07050 personal number! How easy does it have to be for you?!

(Note: I don't think there's much demand, and I instinctively favour market solutions. But there are not insurmountable technical problems with doing this.)

tronator

securityguy wrote: »

Providing email forwarding is no harder than providing number portability between mobile operators and would not, of itself, present significant technical or operational issues...

Forwarding is not a real and practical solution. I wouldn't want my old ISP(s) to be able to snoop into my emails. Secondly, what if I move ISPs several times? Will my emails get forwarded again and again? What if one ISP in that chain gets bust? Now my emails end up where?

And a central database with all email addresses won't work like it does with mobile numbers. Firstly there is only a finite number of numbers, but there are practically infinite number of email addresses. Secondly you need to change some SMTP RFCs and then changing/updating every email server on earth, because nobody will query this database otherwise and keeps sending emails to the MX.

esuhl wrote: »

How daft would a consumer have to be to not realise that the email address they get free through their ISP will only work while they maintain their subscription?!

Who joins BigISP.com, gets the email address randomstring189318@bigisp.com, and expects it to work forever, for free, when they cancel their subscription with bigisp.com?!

You'll be surprised how many people don't think of that? Read this very forum. And I always shake my head when I see a white van passing on the street with a @btinternet.com or @aol.com email address as their contact email....

securityguy

tronator wrote: »

Forwarding is not a real and practical solution. I wouldn't want my old ISP(s) to be able to snoop into my emails. Secondly, what if I move ISPs several times? Will my emails get forwarded again and again? What if one ISP in that chain gets bust? Now my emails end up where?

I'm not advocating this, right? I think it's a non-solution to a non-problem, and I think that "just get a vanity domain" is the right answer. However, I don't like the claim that things are technically impossible when really the point is that they're more generally undesirable or unnecessary. That's how we got into the shambles with content filtering: rather than fight the issue on the grounds of effectiveness and legality, "we" fought it on the basis of being technically impossible, which rebounded when it turned out that it was possible and we hadn't done the hard yards on the more general argument. That said...

Asking ISPs to forward email to former customers is almost exactly the same mechanism as the vast majority of vanity domains. Most people don't actually run a mail server for their domain, instead they buy a vanity domain from Namesco or whoever, and use a control panel at Namesco to set up "user1@van.ity => user1thingie@gmail.com" and "user2@van.ity => user2otherthingie@yahoo.com" and sometimes "*@van.ity => catchall@btinternet.com". The MX record is mx1.names.co.uk or whatever, and the mailer at names.co.uk gets sight of the content even if TLS is in use. Short of running your own mailer, that's hard to avoid. If you have user@isp1.com forwarded to user@isp2.com, isp1 can look at the content. If you have user@van.ity forwarded to user@isp2.com, whoever's operating van.ity for you can look at the content. What's the difference?
If you don't want the extra risk of a forwarding ISP (or whoever) looking at your email, then don't use the portability mechanism: no-one would be forcing you.

Providing a mechanism to update forwardings for customers who have left is not difficult.

It's almost unheard of for an ISP to go bust in such a way that the domain isn't picked up by someone (can anyone think of an example)? A voluntary agreement between the UK ISPs could easily include provision for Nominet to pick up the pieces in the unlikely event of this happening, but in reality an ISP failure is just an opportunity for other ISPs to acquire customers cheap.

And a central database with all email addresses won't work like it does with mobile numbers. Firstly there is only a finite number of numbers, but there are practically infinite number of email addresses.

So what? Suppose everyone aged between 0 and 100 in the UK had 100 email addresses (they don't, nothing like). You'd have a database of about 6 billion rows. If each email address were 32 characters to the left of the @ sign, and there were a 65536 ISPs participating in the scheme, and the destination addresses were up to 64 characters each, all of which are massive upper bounds, each record would be about 100 bytes. 600GB: it's hardly the database to absorb the known computing power of the world, is it? Throw in a load of fancy indexing, record keeping and so on, then maybe it's a couple of terabytes, with a rate of change of perhaps ten thousand records per day. Maintaining it and synchronising that over a dozen or so large UK ISPs and mail providers is hardly a massive job. But I used ludicrous upper bounds: in reality, it would be a tiny fraction of that size.

and then changing/updating every email server on earth, because nobody will query this database otherwise and keeps sending emails to the MX.

Oh, I see why you think the standards need changing. No, it doesn't need that at all. It just needs the ISPs who host the addresses to consult the database. For the UK, that's about a dozen (these days, all the smaller ones either don't offer mail at all or outsource it).

I don't see the point. But I also don't see the difficulty (and yes, I've managed email systems at scale). If we think something is unnecessary, that's the argument, not a spurious (and easily falsified) claim that it isn't possible.

tronator

securityguy wrote: »

Oh, I see why you think the standards need changing. No, it doesn't need that at all. It just needs the ISPs who host the addresses to consult the database. For the UK, that's about a dozen (these days, all the smaller ones either don't offer mail at all or outsource it).

I wasn't talking about the case where the old ISP forwards the email to the new ISP. I was thinking of the sender needs to query this database instead of/before querying the MX in DNS. Such things need to be implemented in the whole world, not only at dome UK ISPs.

As far as I know it works like this for mobile numbers. If somebody calls me, the call doesn't go first to my previous network operator who forwards the call to my current provider. My number is stored in a central database together with my current provider. The network of the person who calls me looks into this database and the old network is not involved in that at all. Correct me if I'm wrong.